Saturday, 19 July 2008

Active inertia

On 14 July, The Economist published an article on Active interia. In this article Donald Sull, an associate professor at London Business School talks about how managers often get stuck in a rut, so when an entirely new situation arises they revert to old responses. Active inertia, Sull says, is “management’s tendency to respond to the most disruptive changes by accelerating activities that succeeded in the past”.

This article is so right on. We've all seen this happen time and again. The challenge is how to get management out of the rut and make them think out of the box, take risks and innovate. I wish Sull would have offered some solutions.